Author: Graves, Louisa Carolina
Biography:
GRAVES, Louisa Carolina, formerly Colleton (1763-1822: ancestry.co.uk)
In 1821 Graves published a companion volume to the work listed in this bibliography. Also entitled Desultory Thoughts, it is a prose account of her history and that of her family. The title page identifies her as “…daughter of Sir John Colleton Baronet, born Baroness of Fairlawn, Landgravine of Colleton [South Carolina], and Sovereign Proprietress of the Isles of Bahama.” However, as an article in the South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine (1900) points out, she was not in fact a landgravine, nor is the female heir of a baronet a baroness. What is certain is that a belief in her right to the titles and to the estates in South Carolina and the Bahamas—bestowed on the first Sir John Colleton by Charles II in return for his loyalty—was a shaping force in her life. She was born on the family estate in Fairlawn SC on 14 Mar. 1763, the only surviving child of Sir John Colleton (d 1777) and his first wife Ann Fulford. (He later divorced Ann, citing her adultery.) She spent her early life in Fairlawn but moved to England during the American revolution. She married Richard Graves on 23 Sept. 1787 at St. George’s, Hanover Square. He became an admiral in the Royal Navy but, like his wife, seems to have felt unjustly treated: in 1812 he published The Case of Richard Graves…Who was Passed Over by Lord Spencer. They lived at Hembury Fort, Buckerell, in Devonshire, and had two sons and a daughter. In 1815 she launched an unsuccessful parliamentary appeal to reclaim the Bahamian property. It is not known when they moved to Brussels but she was living there when she published the two volumes of Desultory Thoughts, one in verse and the other in prose. She died at Brussels on 25 Dec. 1822 and was buried in the churchyard at St. Mary and St. Giles in Buckerell. Richard moved to Paris where, in 1834, he made a will which shows that even then Sir John Colleton’s estates remained tied up in the English chancery court. He died in Mar. 1836 and was buried at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. (ancestry.co.uk 10 Sept. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 10 Sept. 2024; South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 1 [Oct. 1900], 325-41; Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates 29 [1815], 333-35; L. C. Graves, Desultory Thoughts [1821])